And then it finally registered. Oh, that Heloise. As in the Queen of Clean, the Grand Dame of Dirt, the High Highness of Hints.

And suddenly, there she was, seating herself beside me, sporting lavender nails, a suit of lime and aqua and that trademark platinum hair. She picked at a small tub of strawberry yogurt and some fruit.

Heloise

And then, as if to drive home the point she practices what she preaches when it comes to being super-efficient, I noticed she was sipping coffee from not one but two insulated cups, doubled up, no doubt, to keep it hotter longer.

Over the next few days, I got to know Heloise, well enough, in fact, that I was able to pry her cell-phone number from her, something she says "the president of my syndicate doesn't have."

"Oh," she purred, as she surrendered the number to me, "you're good."

Well, at interviewing maybe.

But not so much at getting out a stain, although I did have a modicum of luck using white wine to dab most of the remnants of beet juice from my best shirt during one of the convention's swanky dinners. Ew, did I just write that?

Of course, that's what Heloise is probably best-known for: how to deal with pesky problems around the house. And yes, I do mean husbands.

What I learned, though, is that she's a whole lot more than vinegar, baking soda and rubbing alcohol, yadda yadda.

For instance:
-- Her real name is Ponce Kiah Marchelle Heloise Cruse Evans, which, when you think about it, really doesn't go with "Hints From."

-- She's the second Heloise, inheriting the column and the moniker from her mother, who died in 1977. (Full disclosure here: I sorta thought newspapers were just running earlier versions of the first Heloise the past 20 years or so and re-tooling her hints. I didn't know until last month there was a Heloise II. Sorry about that, Ponce.)

-- Earlier this year, Heloise, who's 58, made a tandem parachute jump with the U.S. Army's Golden Knights Parachute Team from 13,700 feet -- and from the video of it that I viewed, had no stains to show for it.

-- She and her husband, David, are motorcycle nuts. Hers has a sidecar in which her miniature Schnauzer, Cabbie, often rides.

-- She's the author of nearly a dozen books, appears regularly on television and radio shows all over the United States and is generous with several charities.

Heloise and her staff maintain close contact with the 450 newspapers still running the popular column, which deals with age-old questions such as how to cull candle wax from a tablecloth (stick it in the freezer, then use a butter knife to scrape), to new-age solutions for cell phones that accidentally fall into the jon (retrieve quickly, remove the battery and go at it with a hair dryer).

"When people write to me," she told me, "they're writing to their friend. There's no filter. So I try very hard not to change their voice. My editorial philosophy is that I can take out words as long as the meaning stays the same."

She lauds her mother as "every housewife's friend" and says she inherited the first Heloise's ability to "walk into a room anywhere and make friends."

That she can, and, while her personality has helped the column survive now into its fifth decade, I asked Heloise who would write it when she no longer can.

She gave me a wry look.
"Nobody," she answered.

And then she gave me her business card. It's standard size, red as an apple and features in her own cursive style something only a handful of people in this world -- Madonna and Prince and Tiger and Sting come to mind -- can boast.